There are berry trees in the backyard that attract a fair share of flies that come into my apartment when I leave them open to catch a cool breeze. I want to know whether it’s worth it buy a bug zapper and fry the suckers.
For the record, I’m not worried about mosquitos – they’ve never bothered me much.
That I am aware, (and I am open to correction), no critter among the Diptera are attracted to bug zappers, which tend to kill moths in inordinate numbers along with one or two species of beetles. Originally marketed against mosquitoes, they do not attract mosquitoes, at all, and I am unaware of any species of fly that actually pays any attention to them. (For one thing, most flies–unlike their mosquito cousins–are diurnal rather than nocturnal and the special lights used by bug zappers are poor competition for the sun.)
A more likely approach, (that I will not guarantee), would be to hang either fly traps or fly paper in the trees.
We bought a bug zapper this year. I rarely catch a fly in the thing. It’s mostly mosquitos, moths and crane flies.
That said, I suppose you could “bait” your bug zapper for flies like ours is baited for mosquitos. Just buy a bug zapper and hang some sandwich meat on it.
No cites handy, but I’ve seen reports which basically branded bug zappers completely useless for mosquitos and biting flies, if not detrimental.
They found that of all the insects killed, over 99% were benign or beneficial, and that while they would attract mosquitos to the area, they did nothing to deter them from the smell of CO2 once they had arrived.
It was probably “investigative journalism”, however, which you might be wise to take with a grain of salt.
In butcher shops and food preparation areas one often seens those ‘zappers’ zapping flies. Presumably the fly thinks it is a window, flies over for a little window-pane head banging and … zap.
Works for blowies. Of course the fly has to be big enough to induce a spark. Drosophila might be too small.
I can support that with an anecdotal data: while we were in Taipei, we had a bug zapper and it did NOTHING at all to prevent us from getting bitten. I had not seen one mosquito dead in the zapper, but had many mosquito bites.
I also seem to have noticed that Taipei and Tokyo mosquitoes are less noisy and much harder to hunt down then their Montreal counterparts ;-).